ובשלת: means to “roast.”1
ופנית בבוקר IN THE MORNING YOU MAY START BACK [TO YOUR TENTS2]: You do not have to remain [in Jerusalem] for all seven days of the holiday.3
1. The problem that Rashbam addresses in this comment, like the issue in the last comment (see note 58), is the apparent contradiction between our chapter and Exodus 12 concerning the details of the Passover sacrifice. In Exodus 12:8-9, we read that the Passover sacrifice must be roasted and may not be “בשל מבושל במים – boiled in water.” Here the verse says specifically, referring to that same sacrifice, ובשלת. The simple understanding would be that the Passover sacrifice should be “boiled,” but then our verse would be seen as requiring the precise form of food preparation that was forbidden in Exodus.
Rashbam’s comment follows the standard rabbinic solution, which is that the word בשל does not have to mean “to boil,” but can also be the general term used for all kinds of food preparation. Rashbam’s comment is a shortened version of Rashi’s. Their claim that ובשלת here refers to roasting is found already in a number of old midrashic sources (e.g. Midrash Tanna’im to our passage). It can reasonably be argued that this solution is being suggested by the author of 2 Chr 35:13 when he uses the strange locution, ויבשלו את הפסח באש כמשפט והקדשים בשלו בסירות. R. Joseph Bekhor Shor even tries to ground this explanation in the plain meaning of the text when he argues that the verb ב ש ל does not mean to boil until and unless the text adds the word “water.” That is why the text in Exodus reads אל תאכלו ממנו ... ובשל מבושל במים. Had the word במים not been used, says R. Joseph Bekhor Shor, the verse would not be making a statement about boiling the meat.
See Luzzatto who argues that, on the peshaṭ level, our verse allows boiling the Passover sacrifice. He suggests that the laws of Exodus, where roasting was the only permitted method, applied only to the original Passover celebration in Egypt (פסח מצרים) when “hurried” eating (חפזון) was a requirement. He solves the problem of vs. 2 (described above in note 58) in a similar heterodox way by saying that Deuteronomy does permit, on the peshaṭ level, offering cattle for the Passover sacrifice. He suggests that later halakhah (that prohibits cattle and prohibits boiling) does not follow the plain meaning of the text, but reflects the choice of the rabbis who wanted to make the celebration of Passover in their days even closer to the original method described in Exodus 12 (although Luzzatto would say that this method was not prescribed for future generations).
2. The phrase, והלכת לאוהליך, might better be translated as “you may go home.” (See e.g. NJPS, here. See also the use of the phrase in Josh 22:4, 6 and 8.) I translated more literally in order to make Ibn Ezra’s explanation (referred to in note 63) more easily understandable.
3. Again (see notes 58 and 61) the simple meaning of our verse does not seem in accord with halakhic practice. The Passover sacrifice is offered on the fourteenth of Nisan and consumed in the evening between the fourteenth and the fifteenth. If our verse says that “in the morning you may start back to your tents,” the simplest reading would be that on the fifteenth of Nisan people could leave Jerusalem and travel home. But the fifteenth of Nisan is a Jewish holy day in which work, including travel, is forbidden. (See also Tos. Sukkah 47a, s.v. לינה, where further halakhic problems are described if the text were to mean that the pilgrim goes home on the morning of the fifteenth of Nisan.) See e.g. the heterodox conclusions of the Etz Hayim Torah commentary (following NJPSC and others): “Either Deuteronomy does not consider travel to be forbidden on festival days, or it does not regard the second part of the day ... as sacred.” An explanation of that sort seems to have been offered by some medieval Karaites against whom Ibn Ezra polemicizes here. Medieval rabbanite exegetes did not offer such explanations. (Weiss [in Melilah 3 (1950): 197] says that he also was unable to find any Karaite source that says what Ibn Ezra here attributes to the Karaites.)
Rashi follows the standard rabbinic harmonization. (See e.g. Sifre 134.) The phrase “in the morning you may start back to your tents,” does not refer to the morning of the fifteenth of Nisan (when travel is certainly forbidden according to halakhah) but to the morning of the sixteenth of Nisan. The verse, according to Rashi, teaches us that although the holiday finishes on the fifteenth at nightfall, the pilgrims are required to stay in Jerusalem until the following morning. Ibn Ezra offers his own explanation: on the fifteenth in the morning the pilgrims are allowed to return only “to their tents,” which are presumably pitched around the city of Jerusalem. The text says nothing about going “home”; that the pilgrims may do only after the festival day is completed. (See also Karaite sources to this effect cited by Weiss, ibid. See also note 62 above.)
Rashbam’s answer does not really address the difficulty as directly as Rashi’s or Ibn Ezra’s. He says that all that our verse is teaching is that one does not have to stay in Jerusalem for all seven days of the Passover holiday. Presumably he would say that the word בבוקר is not to be taken so literally.